eNews
OTT platform OMTV raises Rs 4 mn funding to scale up original production content
MUMBAI: An OTT network, OMTV that showcases content on Indian Sanatan culture on Wednesday announced that it has secured funding of Rs 4 million. The company shared that it will be using this funding to cover its current operational cost and ramp up the production of original content.
Raj Kumar Jalan and Subhash Jalan led the funding. Raj Kumar Jalan is an IIT alumnus and has been working in Silicon Valley for the last three decades. Raj is a serial investor and invested in a lot of start-ups. He has served as the CTO of A10 most recently (a listed company on the New York Exchange) and played a fundamental role in the company’s growth trajectory. Subhash Jalan is currently settled in Bahrain and has over 15 years of experience in the investment banking domain. Over the years, he has invested in structured and monitored a private equity portfolio with total assets under management exceeding $5 billion.
OMTV founder Nitin Jai Shukla said, “We’re a group of passionate people who wanted to offer content close to our cultural roots. Our motto is ‘Gyan bhi, Garv bhi’ and through our OTT platform, we are showcasing stories that either evoke pride or learn something new. Partnering with Raj Kumar Jalan and Subhash Jalan puts us in a strong position and will enable us to make more interesting stories and connect with a larger viewer base. I thank you for the confidence that they have shown in the concept. I have a go-ahead from them on their participation in the next round of funding.”
“Sanatan Dharma is the richest, culturally most diverse, colorful religious tradition. A vast rainbow for every facet of life. A celebration of life in every way. We need an app like OMTV to tell the stories to the widest range of audiences to create a renaissance, a new sense of awareness, awe and pride for the most beautiful, meaningful religious cultural heritage. Living in America for so many years our 2nd generation American-Indians should be aware of their culture and roots and OMTV promised to deliver just that. I wish all the best to Nitin and his team for the amazing job that they are doing for sanatan culture,” said Raj Kumar Jalan.
Subhash Jalan said, “Our investment in OMTV is predicated on the thesis that OMTV will be the game changer..i.e, it truly heralds a positive change in the way in which viewers will want to absorb, acquire and nurture knowledge of our Sanatan Dharm. The way we see it is that the current landscape of electronic content is minuscule compared to the endless, limitless and huge knowledge base embedded in the Gita, Upanishads and the Vedas in particular and also in our heritage. All that needs to come out and be available to the man on the street in a readily available medium of OTT is now expected to be the order of the day. There is a lot of pure entertainment content out there, but OMTV will be the first platform that would combine knowledge, wisdom, values and morals with entertainment. We are very excited and look forward to OMTV scaling heights in the years to come.”
OMTV was launched during the pandemic and strives to be synonymous with quality content related to Indian culture. The app is available on both Android and iOS and is based on subscription video on demand. OMTV has been associated with short video apps Chingari and Josh and has clocked 100 million+ views and one lakh followers on these apps. It has also collaborated with Magic Box Animation Studios, one of the country’s biggest animation content providers.
The content that one will see on OMTV will either enhance your knowledge base (Gyan) or make you feel proud (Garv) about your culture and therefore reinforce the Indian value system. Over time, OMTV intends to be the aggregator of the content that deals with Indian Sanatan culture. It features a range of content from mythology, history, education, and similar genres.
Post this funding, OMTV is also looking to produce a lot of original content. There is great demand for content that can inform and educate people about the correct values through entertainment. Storytelling is a powerful medium and the best way to communicate, transfer and impart knowledge. All the shows on OMTV will reflect compelling Indian stories and showcase the rich Indian culture.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
